Some readers of this infrequently-updated blog may be aware that I am the chapter coordinator for the Greater Washington Chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. For the month of January we are putting together a truly unique program, and I want to make sure as many people as possible are aware and have an opportunity to attend.
The program is entitled “New Ways of Knowing” and is focused on the application of new Internet platforms and tools to the practice of intelligence collection, creation and distribution in commercial and government environments. I’ll be functioning as the moderator, and our distinguish panel consists of:
Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen, CIA
Sean Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia, CIA
Eric Garland, President, Competitive Futures, Inc. and author of “Future, Inc.”
To give you an idea of the caliber of the program I am expecting, I want to share an excerpt from an interview Sean Dennehy recently gave to the Washington business forum ExecutiveBiz. It’s the most eloquent and concise definition of “Web 2.0″ that I have seen, and goes far beyond the notional buzzword bingo that most pundits throw at you when they talk about the concept:
ExecutiveBiz: Web 2.0 means different things to different people, how would you define the web 2.0 tools as it relates to the intelligence community?
Sean Dennehy: Tim O’Reilly coined the term, web 2.0–it’s basically using the internet or web as a platform in which applications improve the more people use them due to network effects. I often relate to our students a story about when I first joined Facebook (Facebook is a good example because it’s an obvious web 2.0 application). When I first started using Facebook it had very little value to me until other colleagues and friends started using it, then it became a much richer source of information for me. So how does this relate to the IC? Well it’s about user participation. The more people that start participating and using the tools, the more we can work collaboratively to build knowledge across the IC.
Prior to Intellipedia, blogs and TagConnect (the social bookmarking software in the IC), you had to go through a webmaster to get anything posted to the web. I remember sending out “blast” emails to everyone in the IC that you knew worked an issue, but emails fall into what we call a channel and can only be seen by those people on the distribution list, when there might be others outside that list that might have something to contribute. By using blogs, Intellipedia, and TagConnect, you can move the analytic “conversation” previously trapped in a channel out onto a platform where more people can see it and participate. That’s actually one of the recommendations from the Iraq WMD Commission—to make the IC’s analysis more transparent. I believe that these tools can help us become more transparent.
So join us for what’s definitely going to be a great interactive panel.
January 24, 2008
12 Noon – 4:00 PM
Embassy Suites
4300 Military Road
Washington, DC
Register here at the SCIP web site: http://members.scip.org/scriptcontent/BeWeb/events/eventdetail.cfm?
